In 2005, John Ioannidis published an influential paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false". The case he made mirrors developments in other fields, including my own area of psychology, where Simmons and colleagues published 'False-positive psychology' in 2011. I will evaluate the evidence for this gloomy appraisal of the current state of science, conclude we do indeed have a serious problem, and then consider what are the causes of the 'reproducibility crisis', and what can be done about it.
Professor Dorothy Bishop
Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology
University of Oxford
Dorothy Bishop is based at the University of Oxford, where she heads an ERC-funded programme of research into cerebral lateralisation for language. She is an honorary fellow of St John's College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Her main research interests are in the nature and causes of developmental language difficulties, with a particular focus on psycholinguistics, neurobiology and genetics. Her book Uncommon Understanding won the British Psychological Society's annual award in 1999, and she has published widely on children's language disorders. She also chairs the advisory board of the recently-formed UK Reproducibility Network. She has a popular blog, Bishopblog, which features posts on a wide range of topics, including those relevant to reproducibility. She is also on Twitter as @deevybee.